Maybe they have indeed been dead for several minutes and it’s a sign they need to be brought back to life

I went to her live show I think 2 years back in Boston, it was very fun, definitely would go again as long as the content is new!

I leave for Paris tomorrow and while I’ve been planning the trip I had the strangest urge to smoke a cigarette at a streetside cafe sipping some coffee… and I have never smoked in my life. Feels like a real deep cultural meme has gripped me.

“Hey that second photo looks familiar…”

https://thesamueljackson5.bandcamp.com/album/achieve-junk-sofa-melts-sj5-rmxd

I’m not as much of a fan of these remixes as the originals, but still good.
I listen to SJ5 as good atmospheric driving music for misty grey days or drives up through the mountains.

I “programmed” a massive choose-your-own adventure game in powerpoint by using slide links on buttons, and I really wish I could recover that, too… I distinctly remember there being a path where you could be eaten by a banjo.

It’d be one thing if I could maybe go scrounging through my parents basement to find my old PC and image the hdd, but I was such a notorious tinkerer, I was swapping PC parts around constantly and installing a new flavor of linux like every 2 months, so everything is well and clearly wiped many times over.

Even now that I have gotten into photography, looking back, my parents got me a crappy little digital camera in like 2001, and I really wish I could look back at those photos. They never got uploaded anywhere and who knows where they went.

I wish that I could have had the foresight to practice proper data hygiene and backup procedures when I was like 8 so that my brother and I could look at all our old creations.

I don’t usually pay attention to usernames, but I just laughed out loud when I checked their post history. Very rarely do I see a truly shit take on here, but most of the recent posts I remember being real stinkers are all from this same user.

Also the recent obsession with age is very strange.

Can you talk with the IT team?
I was able to switch my MFA to a Yubikey.
They rolled out the MFA policy quite recently and I immediately sent an email like “Hello. I do not have a smartphone. What are my options?”
They also had the option for SMS verification, but I had been looking at getting a Yubikey for myself anyway so might as well get work to pay for it.

Does anyone else feel like the list should be chronological and not alphabetical by discipline?

There doesn’t seem to be any contentious edit war regarding the sorting… Maybe this is finally my time to make a major edit.

Probably not, though, there isn’t much to hold the list cohesively either way.

Still doin’ their thing, they released a new album last year! They went on a small new-album tour and that’s when I was able to catch their show.

I found the source of the quote on the bookmark, and it was a quote by Plato out of Phaedrus so it definitely is real lol. It’s somewhat different on the bookmark, but depending on what translation you look at the quote will probably be slightly different anyway. It’s sections 274e to 275b

But when he came to writing, Theuth said, “This branch of learning, O King, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories, for I have discovered an elixir of both memory and wisdom.” The king replied, “Oh most ingenious Theuth, one man is able to invent these skills, but a different person is capable of judging their benefit or harm to those who will use them. And you, as the father of writing, on account of your positive attitude, are now saying that it does the opposite of what it is able to do. This subject will engender forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, for they will not make use of memory. Because of their faith in writing, they will be reminded externally by means of unfamiliar marks, and not from within themselves by means of themselves. So, you have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding. You will provide the students with a semblance of wisdom, not true wisdom. For having heard a great deal without any teaching they will seem to be extremely knowledgeable, when for the most part they are ignorant, and are difficult people to be with because they have attained a seeming wisdom without being wise.”

I have my font set to Atkinson Hyperlegible, so the lowercase L has a little tail to differentiate it from the capital i, which has its serifs… but in the quote block, the font isn’t enforced for some reason so I had to copy/paste it into this textbox to even see what letter that was.

Interesting stuff that I would have never noticed or thought about otherwise…

I have a bookmark made by the band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum that was sneakily tucked into my merch haul last time I saw them live, and it has a quote on it that I will need to wait until I get home to properly remember, and I also want to do more diligence to figure out if it is an actual quote. At the top it says “A WARNING ABOUT READING”, and the quote says something like:

Beware the written language, man was never destined to record their every thought. How will we continue to remember ourselves when we are now able to cast our essence into this new medium, to remove the memories from ourselves so that we are wrought into perpetual forgetfulness?
-Allegedly some ancient guy from the dawn of books

The “Boops Boops in a bucket” photo used to be the main article image on Wikipedia and it tickled me in just the right way, I screenshotted it in 2021.

I went to check on it a couple years later after telling someone about it, and the photo was completely gone from the article! I was so sad. But I still had my screenshot.

Looking now, the bucket photo has returned further down the page!

Looking at the Wikipedia history for this page is funny, there are so many edits for one page for a small little goofy fish. Really shows how much work goes into maintaining that encyclopedia! And looking at the little spats about such things as the color of the bucket, and whether or not it is appropriate to mention such in the caption… Fascinating. EDIT: I keep going deeper. The caption for this exact image has been HOTLY contested. Also it has been said that the bucket is blue, and also that the bucket is turquoise. Also it can’t be decided on if “Boops boops in a bucket” is an appropriate caption because it is literally correct, or if it is “roflcopter nonsense” simply because the name of the fish happens to be silly…

I have a Dell XPS 13 9315, which is roughly the same size as the 11" air (actually slightly smaller), and I absolutely adore it. I didn’t get the highest-end because I didn’t need it, but it’s available with some decent processors and up to 32Gb RAM. It just sucks that everything is soldered to the board and non-upgradeable, and it has only 2 USB C ports, but that’s the price you pay for the size. The battery life is actually astounding, too, I am constantly amazed how long it lasts. The new XPS13 has the weird square flat keys and no border around the touchpad, I’m really glad I got the model I did because the new ones look like a pain to actually use.

Like I can actually do a little bit of light Solidworks on it if I’m not near my desktop, which blew me away. It plays the indie games I like, too, so it basically just does everything I need.

My winter project is to install Linux on it and get it all working the way I want.

Give the book Ra by Qntm a read
The synopsis is strikingly similar… It’s not lazy writing, I really enjoyed that book.

I don’t take ibuprofen often, but a couple months ago I opened my bottle, shook out 2 pills, and out popped a tiny plastic mammoth. I was very confused. Where had this tiny toy come from? Had it ALWAYS been in this bottle somehow? What kind of wacky assembly line accident could cause this?

I was telling my brother about it and he was like “I FORGOT that I put that in there! Bro it’s been like 3 years!”

Mystery solved. But yeah I was very confused and questioned all the other ibuprofen I had ever taken. I store it under my sink in a box, so not easily visible. Showed me how easy it would be for someone with ill intent to do something actually bad (as long as I trusted them enough to be in my house… which raises the bar pretty high for malice, but still…)
The little mammoth got to go back in the bottle, it lives there now.

My brother and I hid in the basement on New Year’s eve 1999 lol (we were 6 and 8 respectively)
We brought sleeping bags, snacks, a little radio to listen to the news, flashlights and extra batteries… we were SET for survival after everyone else died.

Frozen Nutty Buddy wafer bars were my dad’s favorite growing up… Unfortunately the cheap chocolate that coats them loses the tenuous temper it once had and becomes a liquid sludge at exactly 1 degree below room temperature so it melts all over the place and makes an absolute mess.

My brother and I got good at eating them straight out of the plastic wrapper without touching them.

The novels Blindsight and Echopraxia (Or the omnibus of the two, Firefall) by Peter Watts are a pretty great bit of sci-fi/psychological horror. It explores the questions of what exactly is consciousness and intelligence, etc.
Also there are space vampires.

The main character has been turned into a kind of Chinese Room for human emotion/intention by some kind of brain surgery… Which is why I am thinking about the books right now.

I really thoroughly enjoyed the books and they way they were written, which is mostly in the first-person view of the main character, flaws, insights, Chinese Room and all.

Maybe this is my unpopular opinion, but Dr. Pepper out of a can on a plane at cruising altitude (~8000ft elevation equivalent) tastes way better to me than anywhere on the ground. I call it my magic sky juice. Dr. Pepper is really the only soda I enjoy, anyway.

I am unsure if there are any other changes made to the cans of soda they serve on planes, like a different carbonation pressure, etc. that might make a difference instead of just the altitude.